This chapter provides some background to the ways in which the research was set up and carried out. It explains the interpretive, comparative approach used to study communicative practices in three international cases and the narrative analysis conducted to make sense of the stories citizens and public professionals told about their experiences of participatory practice. It explains how the cases were selected and compared and what they add to the analysis and conclusions about communicative capacity. The chapter then explains what narratives are and how, in each of the three cases, stories were collected through qualitative interviews with local public professionals and citizens, while observation (of participants), document analysis and feedback were used as additional methods to consider data about the same situations. Finally, it explains the grounded theory-building process of identifying emergent categories, patterns and metanarratives, which formed the building blocks of the theory of communicative capacity.

How public encounters in practice can illuminate theory

Instead of approaching public encounters from a predefined normative framework, I looked at what happens in everyday participatory practice. I did not start out with any concepts or theories to empirically confirm or enrich, but developed my own concepts and theories through an iterative process of data interpretation to theory and back again. This was done according to the principle of practice illuminating theory to ‘understand the conceptualized from the immersion in a practice that provides content to the concepts’ (Hummel, 1998, p 154). By engaging in thick description of actual practice – which, as the next section will argue, narratives can provide – we can grasp what happens in-between public professionals and citizens without relying on abstract understandings and concepts (Young, 2000; Bogason et al, 2002; Elías, 2010). It helps to grasp participatory democracy as embodied in the experiences and encounters of public professionals and citizens. Moreover, by using an interpretive approach, we set ourselves up for surprise, letting understandings, categories and theories transpire from the data, from ‘the ones who actually and concretely embody participative practices’ (Elías, 2010, p 10). Comparing these practices as situated in diverse international contexts further illuminates the interweaving of public professionals and citizens and the communicative patterns, processes and capacity that transpire from their in-between.